Irish Americans. Encyclopedia Of American Folklore

Descendants of those who made up the earliest major U.S. immigrant group; their lore
and traditions; stereotypes of them. Ireland’s exceptionally rich folklore tradition was
revitalized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by a vigorous nationalist movement
and literary revival. Little rural Irish folk tradition carried over into the Irish American
context, however, except as a kind of quaintness—shillelaghs and leprechauns decorating
St. Patrick’s Day cards, for example, or a few items from the originally extensive stock of
Irish proverbs, toasts, and blessings. Probably the most famous examples of the latter are
“May you be in heaven a half-hour before the devil knows you’re dead,” and the longer
one beginning “May the road rise with you and the wind be always at your back”
The Irish in America have retained a remarkable degree of ethnic identity and
communal tradition based largely on the surviving racial memory of Ireland itself, which
remains a kind of mythic, pastoral homeland in the group’s consciousness, even for
generations who were not born there and who, for the most part, have never even visited
“the old sod.” Much of the Irish American cultural identity was centered in traditional
Roman Catholicism, however, and in the old stable neighborhood structure of the
American city, neither ofwhich are any longer a significant cohesive influence. In the late
20th century, the group is having to remind itself of its kinship and traditions in order to
rekindle its sense of Irishness and to avoid disappearing further into American mass
culture. Consequently, there is a trend among Irish Americans to take whatever small
measures they can to reinforce their traditions—sending their children, especially
daughters, to Irish step-dancing classes, for instance. And there is a greater tendency than
formerly to drink Guinness Stout, the Irish national brew. Once available only in a few
big city bars, it is now popular enough to be nationally distributed. The Irish American
Cultural Institute, headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota, is one of a number of
organizations working for the preservation of Irish American ethnic tradition. The
institute publishes a quarterly journal, Eire-Ireland.
In the 1990 Census, roughly forty million Americans, one out of six, identified
themselves as having some Irish ancestry. For many the Irish connection was immediate
and clear; for others it may have been remote, guessed at on the basis of a surname or
word-of-mouth family tradition. The likelihood of a contemporary American’s having
Irish forebears is considerable, given the historical fact of extensive Irish immigration to
America, particularly in the 1820s through the 1850s.
There was significant earlier immigration, however, voluntary and forced, as far back
as the American colonial period. The 1630s through the 1650s were decades of
extraordinary political upheaval in Ireland, of devastating British invasion, and a great
many Irish refugees were shipped to work as servants on American plantations. Many
others were exiled into penal servitude in the West Indies, from where they ultimately
made their way to the Carolinas. (An enduring anti-British sentiment has been a defining
trait of Irish American culture, especially up to World War II.)
During the same period, and through much of the 18th century, there was a second
major immigration, this time of Ulster Presbyterian Irish (largely of Scots ancestry), the
stock from which many notable later Americans derived, William and Henry James,
Andrew Jackson, and Stephen Foster among them. (Foster’s bittersweet, nostalgic songs,
it is often pointed out, markedly reflect the influence of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies,
and in 1828 Jackson was hailed as the first Irish American president by Catholic and
Protestant Irish alike.) The northern Irish settled mainly in the Southern Atlantic colonies
and eventually moved, along with much of the earlier Irish population of the area, west
into the Appalachian Mountains and heavily into the Southern and border states. The
term “hillbilly,” in fact, is thought to have been coined with reference to the Appalachian
Ulster Irish, many of whose folk songs celebrated “King Billy” (William of Orange), the
popular Protestant Irish hero whose forces defeated those of the Roman Catholic James II
at the historic Battle of the Boyne in eastern Ulster in 1690.
These early Irish Americans constitute a people of notable folkloric importance, a
primary influence on Southern and mountain culture. Their influence in the area of
traditional music has been widely remarked by music historians. Standard Southern string
and bluegrass numbers frequently represent variations on traditional Irish jigs, hornpipes,
and reels, and bluegrass fiddling clearly harkens back to the Irish country music brought
to America by these early settlers—as do the related dance forms. The American folk
tune “Cotton Eyed Joe,” for instance, is a variation on the Irish tune “The Mountain Top,” and the Irish
“Battle of the Boyne” became “Buffalo Gal.” The extent of this influence was
commented on at the Grand Ole Opry’s sixtieth anniversary celebration by Ricky Skaggs,
who had just just returned from an Irish tour (McWhiney 1988:120–122). Such
borrowing continued through the Civil War—“When Johnny Comes Marching Home
Again” is a cheerful reworking of the mournful Irish folk song “Johnny I Hardly Knew
Ye.” Still later, the Irish, a significant portion of the U.S. frontier troops, transformed the
lively Irish jig “Garryowen” into the stirring march that became the Seventh Cavalry
theme.
Most often when the term “Irish American” is used, it is with the American Irish
Catholic population in mind, the descendants of Irish immigrants who came in great
waves to America especially during the potato famine of the mid-19th century (two
million arrived between 1840 and 1860). Irish American culture is also typically thought
of in terms of its urban expression—associated with Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and
New York in particular (26 percent of New York’s population in 1850 had been born in
Ireland). The American Irish population has always been much more dispersed than that;
early on, New Orleans was an Irish port of entry second only to Boston, and canal, mine,
and railroad work particularly led a great many to the Midwest and West (“In eighteen
hundred and forty-one/I put me corduroy breeches on/I put me corduroy breeches on/To
work upon the railway” went one American Irish worksong). Still, the major cultural
focus has, in fact, historically been urban in character.
The typical immigrant’s agricultural experience in Ireland had often been unpleasant,
associated with tenant farming or sharecropping on rather meager plots. As a result, the
Irish often tended not to be drawn to farming as a way of life in America. The inclination
of so many Irish to cluster in Northeastern cities can also be ascribed to a kind of sea
mystique; many were loath to settle very far from the ocean, a great reminder of home for
these North Adantic island people. Gathering at the oceanside (New York’s shore at Far
Rockaway, for example, was known as “the Irish Riviera”) was a kind of folkcultural
imperative that went beyond the obvious recreational considerations. Saltwater’s healing
qualities were highly touted by the Irish—the virtues of eating kelp and periwinkles, for
instance—as were the agricultural virtues of seaweed. Families often brought seaweed
back to the city from the beaches for use as fertilizer in their urban gardens, a carryover
from the farming tradition in Ireland.
The significance of the enormous Irish Catholic influx into the United States was not
lost on the native WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) population, whose reaction was
decidedly negative and sometimes even violent. (The designation “Scotch-Irish” gained
currency at the turn of the century in the United States as a code word whereby Protestant
Irish could identify themselves as non-Catholic.) The burning of an Ursuline convent in
Charleston, Massachusetts, in 1834, the later Philadelphia and Louisville anti-Irish riots,
and attempts to set Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts, Irish Catholic neighborhoods
afire in the 1850s were the most visible and dramatic expressions of WASP American
anti-Irish bigotry. For a long time, tales of these events, as well as of the potato famine
itself and the notorious “No Irish need apply” notices that accompanied newspaper job
ads in the 19th century, were part of this ethnic group’s oral tradition. They reminded
younger Irish Americans of where they had come from, tending to make them cognizant of each step in the group’s remarkable political and social ascendancy (John F. Kennedy
and Grace Kelly being the culture’s particular exemplars in that regard).
On the other hand, the Irish adapted extraordinarily well to American life. Speaking
English as their first or at least second language as a rule—those who spoke Irish
abandoned it perforce early on—and not being notably “foreign” in appearance were
advantages. Their exemplary service and high casualties in the American Civil War
helped a great deal. (In fact, the most compelling images we have of that war were
recorded by an Irish American photographer, Matthew Brady, and the most renowned
American sculptural works of the same era—statues of Lincoln, Farragut, Sherman, and
others—were those of the Irish-born Augustus Saint-Gaudens.) Mainstream American
culture was eventually somewhat taken by “Irish charm,” a process helped along by the
extensive Irish American stage and music-hall presence epitomized by George M. Cohan.
During the same period, two Irish Americans, Mack Sennett and Hal Roach, were
creating American silent-screen comedy virtually by themselves.
A certain Irishness eventually became part of the popular culture—reflected over the
years in songs like “I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen,” “Peg O’ My Heart,” and
“When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” in parish-life movies of the 1940s like Going My Way
and The Bells of St. Mary’s, or the long-popular Sunday “Jigs and Maggie” comic strip,
Bringing up Father. Even the once abundant “Pat and Mike” jokes were generally rather
benign, not intended as ethnic slurs. And as early as the late 19th century, Currier and
Ives issued a series of Irish landscapes among their otherwise exclusively American ones,
an indication of how much an element of Americana the Irish had already become.
But the American Irish also resisted assimilation. Their early experience of prejudice
made them somewhat guarded and determined to look out for themselves. They
maintained a kind of folk network whereby new arrivals were assisted in finding
positions on the police and fire departments, trolley lines, and in the railroad yards and
post offices of the major cities. It was a network that typically began with young single
women coming to the United States (700,000 between 1885 and 1925 alone) to work as
domestic servants, establishing living quarters, and then sending money home to bring
their brothers, sisters, and cousins over. From this base, Irish Americans made it their
business to master American city politics in a way no other ethnic group was able to do,
to the point that they became synonymous with the urban political “machine” and the era
of the big-city bosses and legendary mayors, most of whom were folk heros in Irish
American neighborhoods—James M.Curley in Boston, “Honest John” Kelly and Jimmy
Walker in New York, Richard J.Daly in Chicago, Tom Pendergast in Kansas City, and so
on. From there, they moved to the national political stage, and by 1961, a watershed year,
the Irish American presence in national politics was so extensive that members of this
ethnic group occupied the presidency itself as well as the posts of attorney general,
Senate majority leader, House majority leader, and Democratic national chairman. Even
into the early 1990s, the House majority leader, Tom Foley, was an Irish American and
the Senate leader, George Mitchell, was the grandson of an Irish immigrant on his
father’s side.
As noted, Irish Americans invested an enormous part of their cultural energies in the
traditional Catholic Church. The Irish Catholic parish was a mainstay of their ethnic
identity. The parish structure complemented, and was to some extent continuous with, the
neighborhood-based Irish political structure in the cities. The Catholic Church in America, once the great Irish immigration of the 1800s was accomplished, became an
essentially Irish American institution. The Irish took great pride in that fact, as well as in
the educational system they were instrumental in building, one that soon ranged from
quality parish schools to first-class universities nationwide. Much of the American Irish
cultural identity derived from the group’s having in common an elaborate, ornate, highly
ritualized, and hierarchical religious life, one that differentiated them radically from the
Protestant mainstream culture. (Protestant Irish Americans, by contrast, tended to be
quickly assimilated.)
A good deal of Irish American folk culture, too, stemmed from the community bonds,
the group ties forged and reinforced by a body of shared cultural-religious references—a
complex system that included holy days, indulgences, confession, fasting, and what, to
outsiders at least, was a female deity. The rigorous and puritanical Catholic school
system provided a tradition of “war stories,” usually based on Irish Catholicism’s rather
severe sexual prohibitions. Perhaps the best known of such tales is that the nuns would
prohibit girls from wearing skirts with patent leather shoes lest the shiny black surface
might serve to mirror their underwear. Another is that the nuns would circulate among
“dancing” couples at grade- and high-school dances insisting that the pairs leave “room
for the Holy Ghost” between them. Some contemporary stand-up comics—notably,
George Carlin—still use such material based on their experiences in an Irish Catholic
school environment.
Part of the considerable Irish presence in sports derived from the Catholic connection,
too—University of Notre Dame football, from its earliest days, has served as a focal point
of Irish American sports legend (though due to Notre Dames image as a megapower of
almost professional status, some of that allegiance has fallen to another Irish Catholic
institution, Boston College). The religious connection resonated in various ways locally,
too. In Chicago, for instance, the allegiance of Irish Americans for a long time was to the
White Sox, founded by Charles Comiskey, one of their own, as against the “Protestant”
Cubs founded by a WASP, Phillip K.Wrigley. But the American Irish presence in sports
has been remarkable even aside from the Catholic context. They, along with German
Americans, dominated the early days of American baseball history; it has been pointed
out that the Mudville nine roster in “Casey at the Bat” (1888), for example, is a markedly
Irish one: “Casey,” “Cooney,” “Flynn,” “Jimmy Blake” (McCaffrey 1992:26–27).
And Irish Americans at one time dominated boxing in all weight classes, almost to the
degree African Americans have in the late 20th century. John L.Sullivan, the first great
Irish American folk hero, won his heavyweight bare-knuckle title from the Irishman
Paddy Ryan, fought his most famous defense against the Irish American Jake Kilrain, and
ultimately lost the title to the Irish American Jim Corbett. Two other epic moments in
Irish American boxing lore, both rehearsed endlessly in neighborhood bars for decades,
were the Dempsey-Tunney “long count” bout (though both fighters were Irish
Americans, Tunney, being Catholic, was the ethnic favorite here) and the first Billy
Conn-Joe Louis fight. Louis had won the title from the Irish American Jimmy Braddock,
and Conn appeared to be taking it back into Irish American hands as he had Louis badly
beaten for twelve rounds. But those rounds would mark the final end of the Irish
heavyweight glory days: Conn walked into a Louis left hook in the thirteenth, and the
lights went out.
Something of the 19th-century WASP anti-Irish caricature can be seen (though in a
less mean spirited form) in a contemporary American ethnic joke like the following:
“What is an Irish seven-course meal?” Answer: “A potato and a six-pack.” Implicit in the
joke, of course, is the image of the Irish as drunken and devoid of cultural sophistication.
It leaves out only a third element of the stereotype—that of the Irish as endlessly
combative (“the fighting Irish”). It must be acknowledged that Irish Americans have
sometimes nurtured these stereotypes themselves, allowing, for instance, St. Patrick’s
Day, for the most part a quiet religious holiday in Ireland, to become an Irish American
festival associated with alcoholic excess and embarrassing schlock such as green beer,
“Kiss-Me-I’m-Irish” buttons, and “Top o’ the mornin’” T-shirts. Another example of the
same sort of self-parody is the pugnacious imp, clay pipe in mouth, who decorates the
Notre Dame marching band’s bass drum.
Irish American cuisine is rather limited compared with that of some other American
ethnic groups. Corned beef and cabbage is an Irish American creation, one unknown in
Ireland itself, where corned beef is unheard of or occurs only as an unappetizing canned
item akin to Spam. Corned beef and cabbage probably began as an Irish American
variation on the common Irish meal made up of cabbage, boiled bacon, and potatoes. Socalled “Irish stew” is likewise an Irish American creation, one substituting beef for lamb
and employing potatoes to a degree the Irish do not in this dish. A predilection for
oatmeal and for oats generally as the grain of choice was also traditionally characteristic
of Irish American cooking. Daily consumption of many cups of strong tea was the rule in
households for the first generation or two, but coffee generally supplanted it after that.
Perhaps most notable among traditions carried over from Ireland, the closest thing to Irish
American “soul food,” is Irish soda bread. A simple, hardcrusted and delicious bread, it is
made from buttermilk, raisins, baking soda, and flour (and sometimes caraway seeds).
Irish grandmothers and mothers have traditionally shown their daughters how to make
this bread (it is thought to be not easily transmittable via written recipe), and it is not
uncommon for it to have survived three and four generations in a family. Irish American
clubs in some cities still sponsor sodabread competitions.
Another way in which the American Irish have attempted to resist being entirely
absorbed into American mass culture is through the employment of traditional Irish
names in naming their children. Bridget, Eileen, Nora, Maureen, Deirdre, Cathleen, and
Mary-Margaret, for instance, have been common for girls; Sean, Dennis, Patrick, Kevin,
Brian, and so forth for boys. But these distinctly Irish names have been taken over by the
American culture at large in many cases. Back in the 1960s, the name “Kevin,” for
example, was virtually a guarantee of its bearer’s Irishness, not so in the 1990s. Irish
Americans in recent years have sometimes gone to the unmistakably Irish name
“Brendan” to mark their sons’ heritage, but even that name has begun to be used more
broadly and figures in time to lose its ethnic specificity, too.
John Morgan
References
Blessing, PatrickJ. 1992. The Irish in America: A Guide to the Literature and the Manuscript
Collections. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America.
Callahan, Bob. 1989. The Big Book of American Irish Culture. New York: Viking Penguin.
Clark, Dennis. 1991. Erin’s Heirs: Irish Bonds of Community. Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky.
Griffin, William D. 1990. The Book of Irish Americans. New York: Random House.
Marman, Ed. 1992. Eire-Ireland: A Comprehensive Index, 1966–1988. Publication of the Irish
American Cultural Institute Vol. 27, No. 1. St. Paul, MN: Irish American Cultural Institute.
McCaffrey, Lawrence J. 1992. Textures of Irish America. Syracuse, NY: University of Syracuse
Press.
McWhiney, Grady. 1988. Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South. Tuscaloosa: University
of Alabama Press.
Miller, Kerby A. 1985. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Nolan, Janet A. 1989. Ourselves Alone: Womeris Emigration from Ireland, 1885–1920. Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky.
Potter, George W. 1974. To the Golden Door. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

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